Recently I finally watched "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug" in cinema. I have to say I dont remember when I experienced full cinema last time, but this time it was. If you are fantasy fan and are interested in 3D then this movie is practically mandatory ride. I wont write about movie itself. There are many reviews on net. I was ready to make compromise about this. If somebody invest such a lot of money into movie then he need to attract as much people as possible and portion of simplification is expected. If I delete barrels scene, most useless combats or "jumping eared squirrels" then I am satisfy.

3D in movie: Apart from dragon I was supriced by this aspect. Sometimes I have had feeling that quality of more scenes is worse then quality of 3D in older Lord of the ring trilogy. This is just personal opinion.

On the other hand I really like Dwarf universe in general. The kingdom under mountain is really nice. l also love the music. I prefer this extended version: www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8ymgF…. It also contains more views of Dwarf kingdom.

So what about to make some concept of dwarf king sword. This is one of my ideas. I did it with ornaments and contour is more "softy" then one would expect. By style it is similar to my older concept: peterku.deviantart.com/art/dar…. I put attention to ornaments and surface. When you make them precisely instead of faking them by maps then also result has bigger quality allowing making close view renderings. Colorisation is black with little yellow at the end. I worked in 3ds max,zbrush and photoshop. Rendering engine is V-ray.

Hi, I have a question. How do you do the patterns on the model? I guess you have a vector drawing you use, because for me it seems easier to draw in Illustrator than in max. I tried importing a spline from Illustrator. I extruded it, but I tried chamfering the edges and that messed up the whole model. It makes it impossible to work with it further. I noticed that the patterns on your model have perfect round edges. How did you do that? I can't tell you how much I would appreciate your help.... I'm really out of ideas. Thank you in advance.

no. its not good to make it in so complicated way. I do not model ornaments at all. For example handle itself. it is usual bar and I applied displace map on it. this displacemap is standart bitmap texture made in any graphic program. If you dont know what is displace map then here is short tutorial: help.chaosgroup.com/vray/help/…

this feature has Zbrush too. If you want to have on model some ornaments in exact size and in exact position then there is function allowing user to cover whole model by displace textures at once. instead of creating ornament manually by sculpting tools.

if you do in like that Then also quality of ornaments (roundness, edges,....) depens only on quality of textures instead of quality of model. (+also quality depends how you set up rendering engine. bigger quality means longer rendering time).

Here's a fun fact about Tolkien's Dwarves, in case you were curious; his Dwarves are based on the Hebrew/Israeli culture. The Dwarven runes resemble Hebrew, and they also were a people without a homeland.

I meant the Dwarves from books by J. R. R. Tolkien, specifically. In The Hobbit, it mentions that the Dwarves are forced out of their homeland by the dragon Smaug, just as the Jews were forced out of their homeland by the metaphorical dragon that was Rome.